Faced with an increasingly difficult challenge in growing both average revenue per user (ARPU) and numbers of subscribers, wireless carriers are trying to develop a host of new products, services, and business models based on data services. One such service is location services, which provide information specific to a location. It is expected that location based services will generate additional business for the carrier, from both the mobile user and content providers.
For the mobile user as well as the service provider, location-based services offer many opportunities. For example, location-based services can increase revenue of the service provider, e.g., network carrier, while improving services to end users, e.g., mobile users. An example of location-based services that can be provided to the mobile user is the use or advertisements such as, for example, directing the user to the nearest business or service, such as an ATM or restaurant. These advertisement services may also include, for example, providing alerts, such as notification of a sale on gas.
While the potential of these services is great, and there is a considerable amount of interest with respect to these services, there are some critical flaws that limit content providers (advertisers) using location-based services. These critical flaws have limited the rollout and deployment of these services and, basically, have limited the revenue that can be generated from such services.
Illustratively, when a mobile device is used in conjunction with A-GPS or tower based location systems, the system uses a center point with a radius to determine a proximity location in order to provide any advertisement to the user. This produces a single proximity, which is attributable to a number of issues. First, there is no mechanism, method or system to determine whether a user actually took advantage of the advertisement, e.g., purchased a product based on the advertisement. For example, a single proximity cannot determine if the user went into a store or building or other environment, which provided the advertisement. In addition, current location based systems cannot accommodate skipping. That is, in current single proximity based location systems, the user may skip in and out of the single proximity, however, each time the user skips in and out the singe proximity, the same advertisement will be resent to the user (i.e., resulting in spamming to the user). This clearly unnecessarily consumes resources, as well as becomes annoying to the user.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.